Preseeded categories: Which ones are allowed to be altered or deleted?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

Terrapop asked about the possibility of altering or deleting preseeded categories in Discourse. Specifically, they inquired about renaming and reorganizing the Site Feedback, Staff, and Lounge categories, as well as deleting them or the Uncategorized category.

awesomerobot replied that it’s possible to delete or move all preseeded categories except Uncategorized. They also suggested that a recent error encountered during an upgrade might be related to search performance changes, but a recent commit might resolve the issue.

Terrapop thanked awesomerobot and confirmed that making changes to the categories, including Uncategorized, and then upgrading again was successful without encountering the same error.

1

Are the following tasks allowed or will they break anything in Discourse?

  • Rename the Site Feedback standard category and slug, and put it under another new parent category.

  • Rename the Staff standard category and slug, and put it under another new parent category.

  • Rename the Lounge standard category and slug, and put it under another new parent category.

  • Rename Uncategorized via text edit (as proposed in the warning text) and slug, but left it as a top-level category.

  • Delete Site Feedback category

  • Delete Staff category

  • Delete Lound category

Thanks for feedback, because I read conflicting in various posts here.

Also we have encountered this here:

2

You should be able to delete/move everything other than Uncategorized… the error you were getting on upgrade appears to be related to some recent search performance changes.

There was a commit made yesterday that sounds like it might help avoid the issue you ran into (I’m not a backend developer, just connecting the dots)

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/54cf3c67664a3eccf2e08710474a100a489d3380

3

Thanks for “connecting the dots” and yes, I made changes to all of them again (despite Uncategorized) and another upgrade worked without the same error.